


Painted Your Soul

by OzQueen



Category: Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin
Genre: Break Up, F/F, Femslash, Relationship(s), Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-28
Updated: 2010-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-10 20:20:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/103872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OzQueen/pseuds/OzQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia remembers what it was like to be Dawn's girlfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Painted Your Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Set after college. This voice might seem a bit OOC for Claud - I'm not too sure. I wrote this a while ago and I've only shared it with a few people!  
> Title from "All For Believing" by Missy Higgins.

She is the only person I have ever seen peel a pear. I remember watching her, at breakfast, on one of those drizzling Saturdays in her kitchen, as she ran a small knife around the outside of the fruit, leaving behind pale flesh and uncoiling a long loop of freckled yellow skin.

“What?” she’d asked, watching me watching her.

“Nothing,” I’d answered. “Why are you peeling it?”

She had looked down at the half-naked fruit in her hands. “I don’t know. I’ve always peeled them. I don't like the feel of the skin. Doesn’t it feel better without skin on it?”

She’d leaned over the table and placed the slippery half of the pear into my hands, watching my face. I’d told her I didn’t know, but I couldn’t help smiling, and she took the pear back from me and finished easing the skin away from it before she cut it into thin slices and ate them one by one with her fingers as I ate the sugary cereal she only kept in the house because of me.

It seems entirely unfair that when I think of those Saturday mornings, I can only recall the ones where it was drizzling. It always seemed to rain, when I saw her. She had tried to compensate by painting the kitchen a bright yellow, like the sun, like her smile, like the feeling she flooded me with when I spoke to her on the phone and touched her cheek with my fingertips. Her hair breathed yellow, her soul spoke it, her smile was all of it – sun, warmth, happiness.

“Why do you have to bring rain here whenever you visit?” she’d asked me once, lying under the sheets with her fingers in my hair. “It always rains when you’re here.”

“It’s barely drizzle,” I’d answered sleepily, too content to raise my head to glance out the window.

“The sun always disappears,” she’d answered. She had sounded sad, then, as though she had been reading something from it, as though the weather was signalling her that we weren’t being smiled on for anything we were doing.

I had been so giddy with it all I hadn’t noticed. She still made me feel so yellow, so warm. We walked on beaches and went roller-skating and sat in the park and blew bubbles, like children, watching them float towards the sky and teasing each other about who could get them highest.

For her birthday I gave her a portrait – dark and streamlined and so unlike her and her sunny disposition and easiness. But she tore the paper off it and her smile only grew brighter as she realised it was her, with her hair spread about her naked shoulders and one thigh carefully shielding an area of her body I could draw with my eyes closed.

“My breasts aren’t that big,” she’d said.

I’d laughed and she’d laughed and she’d immediately hung the canvas over the head of her bed before lying the wrong way on the blankets, her bare, pretty feet on the pillows, gazing up at the lines of charcoal and pencil.

When I visited, it watched us peacefully, and sometimes I’d look at it and trace the same lines of her body for real, with my fingers, my eyes watching the shadows on the portrait. Her belly was so soft and so smooth and her thighs so warm, her skin so pale and lightly freckled.

When she saw me watching it, she kissed me softly.

“Isn’t the real thing better?” she’d asked.

I’d laughed at her. “Of course it is.”

She’d craned her neck up at it, then, and rearranged herself into the pose I’d drawn, throwing the sheet back to bare her skin to the air conditioning.

“Voila!” she’d cried. “How do I look?”

“Like a work of art,” I’d said, smirking.

She’d moved only to rearrange my fingers – curled, but for my pointer, which she rested against her left nipple.

“Draw me,” she’d demanded.

I’d smiled at her and traced her skin with my finger, circling her nipples and her breasts and stroking the skin of her neck and the delicate curves of her collarbone. She had closed her eyes and breathed deeply, her hair fluttering gently in the breeze that spilled out of the vents above us.

“Are you cold?” I’d asked, bending to kiss her nipples.

“No,” she’d murmured. “Don’t stop, Claudia.”

When she said my name there, in that room, in that bed, under that portrait, my stomach would clench and my hands and my mouth would seek her skin until she was panting and writhing under me, her hands locked behind my back, pressing my hips against hers, her thighs squeezing me gently.

Sometimes we would spend all day lounging around in bed, kissing, touching, stroking, licking and sucking and pressing up against one another, my face buried in her hair and her hands on my breasts. Once I licked chocolate off her and she hated the idea of all that sugar and sweetness on her skin until my tongue was there, gathering it all up.

I’m not sure, really, where things started to go wrong. It was so miserable, all of sudden. Always raining, and she hated the rain, and we were stuck inside and I was so tired, going to visit her all the time.

“Why don’t you come and visit me?” I had asked her once, on one of those exhausting Friday nights, after being on a train for so long and then crawling into her bed beside her warm body, which was already sleeping. She hadn’t stayed awake for me.

“I can’t,” she had murmured in response, still half-asleep.

“Why not?”

Whatever the answer was – and I can’t even remember it, now – it wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Sooner or later, it all became too much, and I began to resent her for never visiting me, and for making me go and visit her only to have her blame me for the rain, as though I could personally influence clouds.

Soon we were arguing and I was so tired and she was so miserable it didn’t take long for it to end. Now, I blame the distance. It was hard, keeping it together, travelling, only getting glimpses of her when I wanted to feast. When I left her for the final time, she was sleeping, her arm lying against my side of her mattress, her hair spread over her pillow, her breasts bare. I left her under the gaze of her own portrait.

I wonder now if it’s still there, if she still has it, if she still looks at it and remembers me and remembers why I could draw the lines of her body so smoothly, so strongly, so confidently. I wonder how she explains it to her new lovers, if she tells them no, it’s not her, but a pretty good likeness, isn’t it? But the pear would give it away. I’m sure, wherever Dawn is now, she is still peeling her breakfast pears.

So maybe she took the portrait down. Maybe she got rid of it altogether and now it’s hanging above a cold fireplace somewhere, and strangers hold glasses of wine and gaze at it and wonder who she was and try to decipher my jagged signature at the bottom of it, wondering if I knew this woman, this naked woman with flowing hair and the pear in her hand.

 

 


End file.
